The Nuclear World Project Mission Statement

THE TRINITY BLAST, JULY 16, 1945, 05:29:45 MOUNTAIN WAR TIME

The Nuclear World Project is a story about struggle told from the vantage point of many perspectives and voices. It is about how a technological achievement created a dilemma for humankind. It is worldwide and can have an impact on everyone. It is an urgent and not a well understood struggle, which receives little attention except for sporadic headlines about the threat and sometime calls for abolition of nuclear weapons. Over seventy years ago, at the beginning of, what continues to be essentially a secret parallel establishment, the nuclear world was created by a group of scientists. Seven decades later that secret world is comprised of over 10,000 nuclear weapons, with a proliferation of fissile materials which can be utilized to make nuclear weapons and aspiring states which now number at least forty one nations with nuclear power plants or aspiring to have the power capability which can lead to being able to produce fissile nuclear materials for making weapons, along with what are called “non-state actors” in a race to obtain the weapons and materials, all of this continues to threaten the very existence of humankind and all life on the planet. This does not even deal with the whole issue of nuclear power, which in many respects is at the core of the challenge dealing with controlling the spread of fissile materials.

There was a pride of their scientific achievement, but it was also the beginning of the struggle among many individuals present at the creation as they reflected on the consequences of the weapon they had created. “The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined” General Thomas Farrell observed at the Trinity site.

The Nuclear Requiem

Now more than 70 years after the first and only nuclear bombs were used in war, North Korea’s nuclear tests and the potential for a new global arms race provide stark reminders of the enormous threat posed by the most lethal weapon ever invented.

Produced and directed by former ABC News executive producer Robert Frye, The Nuclear Requiem presents an updated, in-depth reflection on the continuing danger nuclear weapons pose, an honest assessment of the current obstacles to disarmament, and a frank, yet hopeful, discussion of what it will take to overcome the roadblocks to a safer world.

In My Lifetime

This film is meant to be a wakeup call for humanity, to help develop an understanding of the realities of the nuclear weapon, to explore ways of presenting the answers for “a way beyond” and to facilitate a dialogue moving towards resolution of this Gordian knot of nuclear weapons gripping the world. The documentary’s characters are the narrative voices, interwoven with highly visual sequences of archival and contemporary footage and animation. The story is a morality play, telling the struggle waged over the past six and half decades with the last act yet to be determined, of trying to find what is “the way beyond?”